Election cancelled in Chennai

Election to the RK Nagar constituency in Chennai was cancelled by the Election Commission this week after it was discovered that politicians were paying voters for their votes. The constituency was represented by J Jayalalithaa, the previous Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, who died in 2016. After her death, a new leader was required and hence the election was being held.

Days before the election was to be held, government officials discovered documents in the house of a Tamil Nadu minister that showed that one section of the AIADMK political party was planning to pay Rs.4000 to voters to get them to vote for their candidate.

Following Jayalalithaa’s death, the AIADMK has broken into two groups, and these groups are competing very fiercely to win the election. As a result, political parties are going all out to convince voters to vote for their candidate. Bribing people with money for votes has sadly become the normal practice in RK Nagar. With the Election Commission catching them out, let’s hope the problem is fixed before the constituency votes next time.

What’s a constituency?

Every state is divided into a number of smaller parts called a constituency. Each constituency elects a leader to represent it in the state assembly or the central Parliament in Delhi. Do remember that voters in India elect leaders for both. However the constituency is different for each as Parliament constituencies are bigger than state assembly constituencies. In this story, we are referring to the RK Nagar state assembly constituency.